There are a couple of steps that people consistently struggle with when assembling the microscope, for good reason; they're pretty tricky. Number one on the list has to be hooking in the elastic band - I've spent many hours myself jiggling around the bent paperclip tool in an effort to get the bands in, although I've assembled a lot now and probably have "the knack".

It's always easier to spot the problem here than to find a solution, but the latest development branch (v5.16) now has some progress - a different design of actuator where the elastic band gets hooked in from the bottom. While I was at it, I changed the way the nut goes in, so it's inserted from the side rather than the bottom. That means there's no more need to get the push-fit to work (which required strong fingers, and sometimes didn't work at all) in order to fit the actuating screw. We've still got to test it before it's ready for the kits, but there's more details on the OpenFlexure Wiki and you can grab the STL files from the development branch on GitHub.

Once we've checked it works nicely, you can look forward to updated kits soon!